Cabin in the Woods
Apr. 27th, 2012 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinFor the first time in I-don't-know-how-long last night, I actually went to see a movie at a theatre that was not on Disney property. I had heard generally positive things about Cabin in the Woods* and I trust Joss Whedon to deliver entertainment that's head and shoulders above the status quo. And ... it was. I say this coming to it as someone who is not terribly familiar with the Teen Horror Slasher genre (what horror movies I do know are more in the Hammer vein) – I know there are references that I missed, but it played so well on so many tropes that are in the collective consciousness, and the story was good enough on its own, that I never felt like I wasn't 'getting it' at all. The writing was, of course, excellent, the pacing great, the premise interesting and (to my limited exposure) original, and because it was all about subverting tropes it was, for the most part, unpredictable.
*one of my friends threatened to disown anyone in his acquaintance who did not go see it
The more observant reader at this point will probably get the sense that I am leading up to a 'however,' but for that I have to go into spoiler territory, so it goes behind a cut.
There is a lot in this movie that the casual viewer or concerned citizen would call 'disturbing.' It's a slasher film, that's a given. The violence is graphic and they don't hold their punches. I came away from the film with a very queer 'disturbed' feeling that had nothing to do with the brutality on screen though: what got to me was the profoundly nihilistic view of humanity. For 95% of the movie I was okay with this – it's built into the premise, makes for some interesting characters and unexpected turns (and comedy), and is clearly essential to the plot and the ideas that were being presented. But at the very end, when they have a chance to SAVE the ENTIRE WORLD, the protagonists don't even try. It's not that they're cowards – they've done some very brave things leading up to this – and it's not like they're horrible selfish people, or that they have a reason to hate the world, or any number of other things that would have made the shape of the story more complete; as far as I could tell, they refused to try simply out of contrariness. Sometimes the right thing to do is the right thing to do, even if the person telling you to do it is an evil psycho. If the world ends, you're going to die anyway, why not make your death count for something more than just getting one in the eye of your opponent?
I keep coming back to the ending and trying to find the missing piece that would have made it acceptable; an idea that they were trying to illustrate or commentary they were trying to make, which I might have missed. I've tried the following on for size:
1. It's a statement on how good people can let evil happen by standing by and doing nothing (see: everyone who didn't actively work against the Holocaust)
2. It's a conscious subversion of the Christian archetype of self-sacrifice (though the archetype of heroic self-sacrifice predates Christ by a long chalk, I know Joss Whedon has a bee in his bonnet about Christianity)
3. The deliberate unsatisfying resolution is supposed to inspire the audience to go out and stand up for good in their everyday lives
...and have the following ripostes:
1. This should have been worked into the story from the outset, if this is what it was all about at the end, and I'd expect Joss Whedon to know this. While it does excuse the ending, it makes the whole rest of the movie disappointing because it exposes a flaw in craftsmanship.
2. There's a reason why heroic self-sacrifice is such an enduring archetype, and that's because it resonates with people on a really fundamental level. Biologists have spent over a century studying altruism and its counterintuitive place in evolution. Heroic self-sacrifice for the good of the species is built into the very fabric of life; if ants told stories they'd probably have heroic self-sacrifice myths too. On a more specific level, they could have found a way to subvert the expectations of self-sacrifice by pulling a Doctor Who and finding an unexpected way around the 'rules' – Marty was the sort of outside-the-box thinker who I'd easily believe (expected, in fact) to find a third way. But he didn't try! And if he's so resigned to death as not even to try, he might as well go with Plan A and be done with it. This isn't conforming to archetype, this is common sense.
3. I've had this given to me as the reasoning behind No Country For Old Men's unsatisfying ending. My response to that statement is well they should have made that clearer, then.* Near the end of Cabin in the Woods it did cross my mind that this is what they were doing, and I thought to myself aha, I can use this as an example of Doin It Rite to people who go on about No Country ... but by the end of the film it didn't feel like this was the point of it anymore; it seemed to be confident of a feeling of narrative resolution that was, in my case at least, very much not there.
*Even if this had been better-executed I would still have had crippling problems with No Country, but I won't get into that here.
I know the whole film is about the reversal of expectations. I get that. That is what makes the movie worth watching. When Marty was offered the chance for Noble Self-Sacrifice I was not expecting him to take it because I knew that's what I should be expecting and therefore not what was going to happen. What dissatisfied me was that the course of action that was eventually taken didn't gel with the rest of the movie. No one expected Penny to die at the end of Doctor Horrible but when you think about it that's the only ending that could have worked. I don't feel that way about Cabin in the Woods; I feel like at the last minute the filmmakers abandoned narrative integrity for a cheap trick. They could have had exactly this ending and made it work if only they'd laid the groundwork earlier in the movie.
My problem is not with the decision that was made, but its lack of logic. One of the running reversals of expectation in the movie is that characters actually thought sensibly, which they never do in horror movies. My point is, at this last crucial moment, the decision does not make sense – they are behaving as one would expect of characters in a horror movie, and therefore the filmmakers are going back on their own agenda of subverting tropes. Maybe it is a double-reversal? If that was the point of it, it should have been plainer.
Maybe what I find most disturbing about it is that it's more misanthropic than me. I am by nature a cynic; I have never held much truck with the belief that people are basically good – I believe that deep down humans in general are self-interested bastards and that goodness is the result of much effort – but this movie seems to say, quite casually, shockingly casually, that nothing is worth fighting for. In many ways Cabin in the Woods confirms my opinion of humanity, so I ought to leave feeling vindicated, but ... maybe I've been spending too much time with heroically self-sacrificing Edwardians who believed it was possible, indeed necessary, to be more than that; what vindication there is rings disappointingly hollow.
In summary: Good film overall, cleverly written, feels a bit like it could have been a grand story arc for a season of Buffy but in a good way ... If you like Joss Whedon, this sort of horror, or puncturing archetypes in general, you will probably want to check it out at some point. I saw it in a small theatre in 2D and can't imagine what the benefit of seeing it in 3D could possibly be (especially as it's all post-process, which sets my teeth on edge); I also think it won't lose much in the transition to the small screen, so if you have to wait for the DVD release don't feel bad. I do request that if you wait and watch it at home, you pay for it in some way, because the studio took a chance on making a smart film with a good script and letting the director have his way with it, which should be rewarded in our creatively bankrupt age.
I feel compelled to state that this is a really, incredibly, gruesomely gory movie, just in case anyone might have a problem with that or is going into it with different expectations. It ain't pretty! But it does do a good job of maintaining the audience's distance, quite often with humour, and other times with just being so ridiculoulsy gory, that (at least to me) the gore wasn't as upsetting as it would have been had everyone been taking it seriously. It falls somewhere between Kill Bill and Shaun of the Dead gore and tone wise. Fun, if you can do that sort of thing, but unbearable if the sight of blood makes you faint.
P.S. I agree wholeheartedly with everything innextian's much more specific and necessarily spoilerific post!
*one of my friends threatened to disown anyone in his acquaintance who did not go see it
The more observant reader at this point will probably get the sense that I am leading up to a 'however,' but for that I have to go into spoiler territory, so it goes behind a cut.
There is a lot in this movie that the casual viewer or concerned citizen would call 'disturbing.' It's a slasher film, that's a given. The violence is graphic and they don't hold their punches. I came away from the film with a very queer 'disturbed' feeling that had nothing to do with the brutality on screen though: what got to me was the profoundly nihilistic view of humanity. For 95% of the movie I was okay with this – it's built into the premise, makes for some interesting characters and unexpected turns (and comedy), and is clearly essential to the plot and the ideas that were being presented. But at the very end, when they have a chance to SAVE the ENTIRE WORLD, the protagonists don't even try. It's not that they're cowards – they've done some very brave things leading up to this – and it's not like they're horrible selfish people, or that they have a reason to hate the world, or any number of other things that would have made the shape of the story more complete; as far as I could tell, they refused to try simply out of contrariness. Sometimes the right thing to do is the right thing to do, even if the person telling you to do it is an evil psycho. If the world ends, you're going to die anyway, why not make your death count for something more than just getting one in the eye of your opponent?
I keep coming back to the ending and trying to find the missing piece that would have made it acceptable; an idea that they were trying to illustrate or commentary they were trying to make, which I might have missed. I've tried the following on for size:
1. It's a statement on how good people can let evil happen by standing by and doing nothing (see: everyone who didn't actively work against the Holocaust)
2. It's a conscious subversion of the Christian archetype of self-sacrifice (though the archetype of heroic self-sacrifice predates Christ by a long chalk, I know Joss Whedon has a bee in his bonnet about Christianity)
3. The deliberate unsatisfying resolution is supposed to inspire the audience to go out and stand up for good in their everyday lives
...and have the following ripostes:
1. This should have been worked into the story from the outset, if this is what it was all about at the end, and I'd expect Joss Whedon to know this. While it does excuse the ending, it makes the whole rest of the movie disappointing because it exposes a flaw in craftsmanship.
2. There's a reason why heroic self-sacrifice is such an enduring archetype, and that's because it resonates with people on a really fundamental level. Biologists have spent over a century studying altruism and its counterintuitive place in evolution. Heroic self-sacrifice for the good of the species is built into the very fabric of life; if ants told stories they'd probably have heroic self-sacrifice myths too. On a more specific level, they could have found a way to subvert the expectations of self-sacrifice by pulling a Doctor Who and finding an unexpected way around the 'rules' – Marty was the sort of outside-the-box thinker who I'd easily believe (expected, in fact) to find a third way. But he didn't try! And if he's so resigned to death as not even to try, he might as well go with Plan A and be done with it. This isn't conforming to archetype, this is common sense.
3. I've had this given to me as the reasoning behind No Country For Old Men's unsatisfying ending. My response to that statement is well they should have made that clearer, then.* Near the end of Cabin in the Woods it did cross my mind that this is what they were doing, and I thought to myself aha, I can use this as an example of Doin It Rite to people who go on about No Country ... but by the end of the film it didn't feel like this was the point of it anymore; it seemed to be confident of a feeling of narrative resolution that was, in my case at least, very much not there.
*Even if this had been better-executed I would still have had crippling problems with No Country, but I won't get into that here.
I know the whole film is about the reversal of expectations. I get that. That is what makes the movie worth watching. When Marty was offered the chance for Noble Self-Sacrifice I was not expecting him to take it because I knew that's what I should be expecting and therefore not what was going to happen. What dissatisfied me was that the course of action that was eventually taken didn't gel with the rest of the movie. No one expected Penny to die at the end of Doctor Horrible but when you think about it that's the only ending that could have worked. I don't feel that way about Cabin in the Woods; I feel like at the last minute the filmmakers abandoned narrative integrity for a cheap trick. They could have had exactly this ending and made it work if only they'd laid the groundwork earlier in the movie.
My problem is not with the decision that was made, but its lack of logic. One of the running reversals of expectation in the movie is that characters actually thought sensibly, which they never do in horror movies. My point is, at this last crucial moment, the decision does not make sense – they are behaving as one would expect of characters in a horror movie, and therefore the filmmakers are going back on their own agenda of subverting tropes. Maybe it is a double-reversal? If that was the point of it, it should have been plainer.
Maybe what I find most disturbing about it is that it's more misanthropic than me. I am by nature a cynic; I have never held much truck with the belief that people are basically good – I believe that deep down humans in general are self-interested bastards and that goodness is the result of much effort – but this movie seems to say, quite casually, shockingly casually, that nothing is worth fighting for. In many ways Cabin in the Woods confirms my opinion of humanity, so I ought to leave feeling vindicated, but ... maybe I've been spending too much time with heroically self-sacrificing Edwardians who believed it was possible, indeed necessary, to be more than that; what vindication there is rings disappointingly hollow.
In summary: Good film overall, cleverly written, feels a bit like it could have been a grand story arc for a season of Buffy but in a good way ... If you like Joss Whedon, this sort of horror, or puncturing archetypes in general, you will probably want to check it out at some point. I saw it in a small theatre in 2D and can't imagine what the benefit of seeing it in 3D could possibly be (especially as it's all post-process, which sets my teeth on edge); I also think it won't lose much in the transition to the small screen, so if you have to wait for the DVD release don't feel bad. I do request that if you wait and watch it at home, you pay for it in some way, because the studio took a chance on making a smart film with a good script and letting the director have his way with it, which should be rewarded in our creatively bankrupt age.
I feel compelled to state that this is a really, incredibly, gruesomely gory movie, just in case anyone might have a problem with that or is going into it with different expectations. It ain't pretty! But it does do a good job of maintaining the audience's distance, quite often with humour, and other times with just being so ridiculoulsy gory, that (at least to me) the gore wasn't as upsetting as it would have been had everyone been taking it seriously. It falls somewhere between Kill Bill and Shaun of the Dead gore and tone wise. Fun, if you can do that sort of thing, but unbearable if the sight of blood makes you faint.
P.S. I agree wholeheartedly with everything in
nextian's much more specific and necessarily spoilerific post!
